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Tuesday, July 12, 2016

It’s
been a long long time since I traveled alone in a foreign country, but that’s
where the plan took me today. As you recall, this little vacation was triggered
by Ally’s business trip to Cologne, which commenced today, Tuesday. She left St. Goar at
around 6.30 am, which would allow plenty of time to be at her 9 am meeting (the
main foreseeable problem would be to make the mental shift). I went to the
station with her, saw her off, then went for an hour-long walk, to Das Boot, which I
described before (and which looked even more eccentrically desolate at this
time of day), and back. I went to breakfast by myself. “Are you alone?” asked
the guy with apparent astonishment, as he lit my lonely candle.

I was
scheduled to leave St. Goar at 9.21 – astonishingly, the train was late! As I
had only five minutes to make a connection at Oberwesel, I then needed to
decide whether to get off there regardless of having presumably missed that
connection, or whether to stay on the train I was on and work it out later. I
got off, and it turned out the connecting train was late as well – all immaculately
coordinated I’m sure. The whole check-in/security process took no more than
half an hour. The highlight of that was seeing an Ozu-like dog, apparently
about to be placed in a crate to embark on a flight, and looking too happy to
be aware of what was coming (I don’t anticipate we’d ever put Ozu on a plane –
it would only be out of utterly unavoidable necessity).

Then
I had three hours or so to wait around at the airport. I don’t mind such
waiting around too much, as long as I can use it to read or do things I would have
done anyway at other times (i.e. so that the time needn’t in any sense be
considered “wasted”) and I had more than enough of a to-do list to meet that
criterion for today’s waiting time, for the flight home, and for a big security
margin on top of that. I made pretty good progress on this list, largely
because of sleeping only minimally. I had an aisle seat, but when I arrived at it
I was asked by a couple who’d been separated whether I’d switch and take her
middle seat in another row. She was much larger than I was so I made a snap
decision that I would contribute to the common good by agreeing to this
(usually of course, my own well-being would have been greater by staying on the aisle, but
even that might not have held here, sitting next to a possibly disgruntled husband
for eight hours). Anyway, no doubt I did the right thing.

The
flight was on time, and Canadian immigration took no time at all, but then the bag took an
hour to show up (as they always seem to at Toronto Pearson unfortunately) and of course
traffic into the city was slow. But I picked up Ozu exactly at 7 as planned. We
ran home, and celebrated in our usual buoyant manner, and for me that’s always the official end of the vacation. Meanwhile,
Ally did a full day’s work, and when I called her from the airport, she’d had
dinner long ago, and had been in her Cologne hotel room for a couple of hours,
just winding down the day. We don’t have too many days when our trajectories
deviate so dramatically…

Monday, July 11, 2016

Last
night was the Euro soccer final, although I suppose it would have had a more
galvanizing impact on St. Goar if Germany had made it to the end. As it was,
the Bistro Café Goar was showing the France vs. Portugal game on a TV screen inside.
After we’d finished eating and were having drinks, we moved to the terrace, a
perfect spot for monitoring both this and the river (the parade of grand
industrial barges continuing after dark, like stately elongated whales). When
normal time ended without a goal, some of the clientele left, apparently with
some mocking from the others for their lack of fortitude. We left around that
time too (to no mocking), counting eight or so mostly elderly remainees. And
that was the Sunday action in St. Goar.

On
Monday we again had breakfast in the hotel (the guy at the next table was
surreptitiously assembling sandwiches from the breakfast buffet materials and
putting them in his briefcase) before heading off for another seven hour-plus
exploration. We climbed up behind town to the top of the gorge and followed a
trail for several hours, eventually coming back down at the town of Oberwesel.
As I mentioned, this is only really an achievement in climbing if you’ve artificially
placed yourself down at the bottom – following the trail, we frequently walked
past housing developments or resorts or whatnot, reminding us that’s where the
real world is, up there! The highlight of the walk though came during one of its more
deeply forested sections, where we came across an old man and woman dragging a (very
reluctant) sheep along the path. We should have blocked the way, chanting: Free
the Sheep!

Actually,
the real highlights were naturally the constant views down into the gorge –
every new look-out point gives you a new reason to stop and breathe it in. Oberwesel
also looked great from up above, but is rather dull and disappointing close-up,
even allowing that Monday seems to be a day off for a lot of small businesses.
The biggest comparative limitation may be that St. Goar has hotels and
restaurants with almost direct access to the river (excepting the road, which isn’t
too busy), but in Oberwesel the railway runs closer to the water,
holding back the rest of the town (there’s an old city wall in the way too). I
expect it made sense at the time to lay things down that way, but now it makes the place feel constricted.
We had trouble even finding a suitable place to eat, but eventually sat down
and had a couple of sandwiches, and five separate beverage orders between the
two of us. We watched a woman arriving at a nearby hair salon for what was
presumably a 2 pm appointment, waiting outside for the hairdresser to return from her
break, getting increasingly impatient, trying unsuccessfully to place a phone
call, eventually giving up at around 2.20 pm and leaving under a dark cloud.
The hairdresser turned up ten minutes after that, with her dog and her
shopping bag, beaming happily and without an apparent care in the world. That’s
probably how it goes down here in the small towns.

By
the way, if you climb all the way up from Oberwesel, someone (apparently an
anonymous artist) is carrying out a project of constructing large metal “troll”
sculptures – based on the dates, it appears a new one gets added every year. There’s
one at the roadside; the others are lurking in the woods. Here is Ally with a
representative example.

We
then decided that if we walked on a further 6 km or so to the town of
Bacharach, we’d arrive in time to catch the hourly train back to St. Goar. This
was an easy 6 km by comparison with what we'd already done, all along the river, no climbing. We achieved this with time
to spare, enough to wander round Bacharach (which was also mostly closed) to find
an ice cream. The scenic highlight of the walk was the town of Kaub on the
other side, with its eye-catching white castle on a tiny island in the middle
of the river (it is called Pfalzgrafenstein Castle and was built as a
station to extract tolls from passing vessels – mundane functions were
discharged with so much style in the old days!).

There didn’t seem to be as many cruise ships in the water today –
maybe business surges at the weekend; certainly the volume of motor bikes had
plummeted. I would have placed a bet that Bacharach would have held at least
one prominent tribute to its famous namesake Burt, perhaps a modest statue on
the theme of What’s New Pussycat?, but if so we missed it. It’s another very
picturesque town though, again with old walls and cobbled streets intact, so
that you could shoot a historical film on the back streets with minimal
cover-up of contemporary details.

That
added up to a lot of walking today, a punishing achievement even if the weather
was slightly cooler than yesterday. We picked up another beverage (whenever we’re
in Europe we drink bottle after bottle of Fanta – we never buy it at home, and
if we do it doesn’t taste the same anyway) and then returned to the hotel. Once
again, we did not succeed in seeing Ozu at the pool. Some of the restaurants
were closed tonight, again because it’s Monday I suppose – we ate in a quiet
place in the middle of town, which also closed as soon as we left, and then
ended up drinking beer over the water. It becomes ever more clear that there
are fewer functioning businesses here than meets the eye. For instance, there’s
a hotel near us that looks open – there are flowers in all the windowboxes –
but we’ve never seen any signs of life there, and based on an online search it's not taking reservations. It’s quite sad, the sense that the world is
losing its taste for this kind of quiet location. St. Goar does appear to be a
regular stopping point for a Contiki tour bus – this is a company catering to
18 to 35 year olds, known for the partying nature of the experience – and this
may explain some of the young women we saw wandering around on previous nights.
Mostly though, it appears the Contiki groups stay in a hotel on the other side
of town, where they create their own self-contained world of fun. Can their
world ever overlap with the rest of St. Goar, to spark a new mutually
beneficial way forward...?

Sunday, July 10, 2016

The
Rheinfels hotel feels largely empty, and almost haunted too, by virtue of
the motion-detecting light switches that illuminate the nighttime corridors as
you wander down them. But based on the breakfast room this morning, the place might
actually be full. It was a very nice buffet, with almost everything you could think
of, excepting chanterelles, and overseen very efficiently by a single aging
waiter in a bow tie. The tables had white tablecloths and, even at this time of
day, burning candles.

The
feeling of emptiness and under-utilization is pervasive to the town though. On both this
and the other side of the river, we see numerous closed hotels and
restaurants, suggesting more prosperous times in the past. Much of the activity
now consists of people arriving in tour buses, catching a ferry for a cruise on
the Rhine, and then disappearing, to be picked up elsewhere. Today we walked
past an old-fashioned caravan park, people reading and drinking beer outside
their camper vans, in their little square of river-facing space. There’s
absolutely nothing in the vicinity that feels in any way new. Of course, this is the charm of the place, if you’re into it,
but it feels like much of the world may be moving on…

Well,
at least they have the two of us for now. The ferry to the other side is an
impressive operation, carrying over maybe as many as twenty cars on each run,
along with sundry bikers, cyclists, walkers and dogs. It goes every twenty
minutes, back and forth, until late into the night, loading and unloading with what looks like unceasing
efficiency. From where we're staying, you get the impression that the town on the other side,
minimally distinguished from St. Goar by calling itself St. Goarshausen, might
have more action, but when we crossed over this morning we found out it’s not true. We picked up a drink and some
snacks (from the one place that seemed to be open) and set off. In addition to
being able to walk along the river in any direction on either side, one can
also climb out of the gorge (I keep wanting to refer to them as hills or
mountains, but it’s not that they’re so high, it’s that we’re so low) and hike
above, again on either side in either direction. We did that today, selecting a
trail that should have taken us several hours, winding past several castles.
We managed to complete the most difficult stretch, the initial climb, but then
found out the rest of the trail was closed, due to a rockslide or something. We wandered
around up there as much as we could, but ended up coming back down to
where we started. Then we set off in the other direction, taking on another
tough initial climb, this time with greater subsequent success. We followed the
trail for a couple of hours, much of it along farmers’ fields and vineyards,
often clinging to the side of the gorge in a way that looks precarious. Of
course, the valley views from there are magnificent, endless compositions of water
and sky, and largely tasteful insertions by mankind.

We
descended near the castle Maus and into the little village of Wellmich, which
doesn’t have too much going on. From there we walked back along the river to
St. Goarshausen. This was about five hours since we left the hotel, and it was
hot and often exposed throughout, so that was as much applied activity as you
could really expect in one day. We sat around in the shade for about an hour,
having a toasted sandwich, some ice cream, and lots of beverages. A lot of the
activity on the road seemed to belong to motor cyclists; all the bikes highly polished and shining in the sun, all the gear immaculate. Apparently this is regarded as a prime road for motor biking, so maybe we're watching (say) junior accountants from Frankfurt living their dreams for an afternoon.
Other aspects of the local culture could
appear aligned with the biker culture too, given that we’ve seen ads not only for
Deep Purple but also for a Monster Truck show, Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow and
(sic) Thin Lissy, Of course, I’m engaging in wild stereotyping there, as
there’s no inherent reason why the bikers couldn’t be down here for (say) a
Goethe symposium.

We caught the ferry back to the other side. I mentioned that St. Goar would have seemed to belong to the old rather than the new Germany, but as we arrived back the street was filled, rather mesmerizingly, by an Islamic pilgrimage (or, more likely, a tour group heading for the bus). But eventually they were gone and things went back to normal. While we were in the hotel for our afternoon break, Canadian Milos Raonic lost in the Wimbledon final. For the last few trips, Ozu has been staying in a new location, called “Park 9.” Once a day, the dogs get to use an indoor pool, and Ozu loves it beyond description – he dips his paws into the water, loses his head with excitement, and goes running around the perimeter like a maniac, then repeats the process endlessly. Based on past experience, and given the time difference, I thought we would taking our afternoon break at the optimum time to watch this display on the webcam, but we’ve seen little evidence the pool is ever used at all. Well, I suppose every trip has to contain at least one disappointment.

We were aware that things might close down earlier on a Sunday,
and so they did – we sat down outside the Bistro Café Goar just as the kitchen
was closing, it seems. It really wasn’t very memorable food though, even
allowing for our scaled-down expectations, so there may be little qualitative
difference between the kitchen being open and it being closed. An hour or so
later, a group of young women walked by, looking dressed up for a visit to a
nightclub or suchlike. Based on what we’ve observed of the town, they were definitely
misinformed; but on the other hand, they wandered off somewhere and we never saw
them again, so maybe it has its secret gathering places…

Saturday, July 9, 2016

We
both slept very solidly, and woke up ready for a whole day of Germany! We spent
the morning seeing more of Frankfurt, and by the end of it we’d covered the
heart of things quite well, despite the time we lost on the first afternoon
(and by the way, we realized today how unlucky we were – if we’d been even a single block further east when we joined the street that caused all our problems, we would have had clear
access to the river, would have immediately realized we were turned around, and
then the rest would never have happened, although on the other hand then we wouldn’t have
our memories of Griesheim). We stopped for breakfast at a bakery (of course
every European city has a bakery basically on every block, the inventory never
changing too much from one to the next), retraced some of our steps from last
evening up to the Euro sign and the main finance district, and then continued
on into the main retail streets. It was a busy Saturday morning – the streets
were packed. We went into the Galeria Kaufhof department store, now owned by
Ally’s employer HBC and linked to the purpose of her visit here (so I suppose
you could call it research). It’s very reminiscent actually of HBC stores in
Canada – the food hall in the basement is particularly impressive (I’ve never
seen such a large and nicely arranged display of water bottles). The store was
busy too, although it’s always possible people are merely browsing before
heading home to place their orders online.

We walked through
an open air market, notable compared to those elsewhere for the volume of
beer and wine consumption (based on what we've seen so far, the cliché still holds - Germans love drinking, and don't have too many restrictions on when and where it happens). We walked down to the river, wandering up one
side and then down the other. Frankfurt has some more than pleasant views along
there: some striking modern buildings contrasting with the older ones (or more
accurately in many cases, the reconstructions of the long-destroyed older
ones), but needless to say, if it does indeed replace
London as the European centre of finance, as has been speculated post-Brexit,
it has some catch-up to do in terms of overall scope and dynamism.

We
returned to the hotel to pick up our bags and then headed to the station. The journey to St. Goar took about an hour and a half, with a
simple change about a third of the way through. We splurged on first class,
which meant a nice separate carriage on the first train (although not with
working wi-fi, contrary to the legend) and then a barely differentiated space
behind a glass partition on the second. The journey became quite lovely in its
final stretch, overlooking the Rhine, traveling through a series of small
towns, regularly overseen by high castles. We'd read that one can walk along the river for a
long way - with regular ferries to the other side and easy access to
the railways, it should be hard to get lost or stranded. This is the premise
of the next few days anyway.

We
instantly found our hotel, the Rheinfels, where the guy at the desk seemed
highly amused that I have the same surname as a member of Deep Purple
(coincidentally, or not, Deep Purple are actually playing here soon, on the
other side of the river, although there’s nothing in sight resembling a
performance venue, or even say a large playing field) (actually Ally just
looked that up – they're playing in an amphitheatre somewhere among the rocks – might not
be such a bad gig!). It’s an older but well-maintained hotel; our room is quite
large and has a balcony overlooking the river, directly across from the nearest
ferry stop.

One
thing we hadn’t considered is that walking along the Rhine isn’t necessarily
peaceful in the same way as many of the classic walks we’ve taken – there’s a
road that runs right above it, and there's the railway just above that. There’s a
cycling track and a walkway, and occasionally the trail dips down closer to the
water, but you could never succumb to the illusion of being away from
everything. That said, it’s very beautiful here, a completely satisfying spot
to spend a few days. St. Goar is really little more than a strip along the road
(at its most built up point, there’s a second strip behind that), but the
possibilities lead away from you in all directions. This includes the upward direction,
where we climbed the hill to an old castle – there’s a hotel up there too. We walked along the river to the west, a
steady stream of ferries and afternoon cruise ships and industrial barges
passing by (funny though that we didn’t see a single small craft – maybe they’re
restricted). We could have kept going indefinitely, but we stopped around the
time we reached “Das Boot,” apparently someone’s past brainwave of building a
hotel in the shape of the top half of a boat (I’m sure it was fun in its
heyday, but now it’s abandoned).

The
town has six or seven reasonable-looking places to eat at night, although the
menus don’t seem to vary much from one to the next. We chose Hotel am Markt, in
the square in front of the town’s largest church (it has two). Most of the clientele seemed
pretty elderly, and in some cases that’s putting it mildly. The waiter was
initially attentive, but then seemed to lose interest entirely, reappearing
only on the two occasions when we gave up waiting and I walked over to the
building to look for him. Just as in Frankfurt, the main menu was supplemented
by the special seasonal chanterelle menu. It’s amazing though how prices change
when you get out of the big cities – our meal and what we drank were much the
same as last night, but the bill was over 40% lower (under 60 Euros). The same
thing goes for the hotel too. Anyway, I suppose the waiter had a point – there’s
no purpose in hurrying; once it gets dark, there’s nowhere else happening
around here…

Friday, July 8, 2016

So it
came up that Ally would be going to Cologne for work again, for the fourth time
in less than ten months. We’d vaguely discussed I might tag along on one of these trips,
and this seemed as good a time as any, so we quickly cobbled together a long
weekend plan. In brief: we fly out of Toronto on Thursday evening, arrive in
Frankfurt Friday morning, spend a day there before going to St. Goar in the
Rhine Valley around lunchtime on Saturday, spend two and a half days
there. On Tuesday I return home, and Ally goes on to Cologne to do her work,
returning on Friday. It might be seen as a lot of cost and effort for such a
short trip, but on the other hand, her flights are already paid for. Anyway,
for various logistical reasons we couldn’t add on any more days; it was this or
nothing, so we decided to go with this.

It’s
been a long time since we had any real problems at airports, and that
held again here; both our arrival and departure took place at near-record speed (it
helps that we were flying premium economy, which gets you into the
business class check-in counter and moves your luggage up in priority,
among other things). We took a train to the main station, which of course
was as easy as everything train-related in Europe. We’d picked a
hotel near there to reduce logistical challenges, and located it easily
enough after a few initial wrong turns. As so often, the streets around the station
might not be regarded as the best invitation to the city, although it’s just life with all of its waiting and staring and yelling and scurrying. Certainly the
streets belong to the new heterogeneous Europe, not to the old guard.

We
stayed at the Hotel Bliss, oddly described in the room as an “exhibition and
design hotel for the discerning little closer.” The design is of a familiar
kind – lots of clean white lines: there are photos of
old Hollywood stars throughout, although it’s hard to see how that relates to
anything, thematically speaking (we were in the Audrey Hepburn room, at the end
of the James Stewart corridor). Our plan for the afternoon was simple enough –
walk to the downtown old city, which seemed like it should take half an hour or
so, then maybe walk along the Rhine, and return to the hotel for a break having lapped up the main
Frankfurt attractions, albeit not in much depth. So we went out, and after
stopping at a nearby bakery for a snack, launched into just that.

This
ended up as one of the more inexplicable escapades of our many travels
together. We’ve often started walking without looking at the map in too much
detail – usually it works out fine; when it doesn’t, it’s an experience
in itself. Today we wanted to stay more or less on track because of our limited
time here, so after initially wandering off track a bit, we consulted the map, adjusted our route
and kept going. We were walking directly towards the old city, but we kept walking
and it refused to appear. Eventually we came to some older residential streets and thought, this must be the start of it, but then that ended and we were merely walking along a highway. We couldn’t make any
sense of it from the map. Then eventually we realized we’d been walking away from the city, the greatest blunder
possible. We’ve done this before, but always as a result of being caught up in
irregular street layouts where even a subtle shift in your sense of direction
extrapolates into overshooting the moon by about half a light-year. On this
occasion the streets had seemed largely straight, and straightforward, so it’s
especially perplexing. At least we blundered together – it’s not as if one of
us had overridden the instincts of the other, thus giving the latter something to bring up for
the rest of our days (if we were like that).

Anyway,
the residential streets that we'd taken for the old city of Frankfurt actually belonged to the nearby town
of Griesheim. We caught a bus to the Griesheim station, and then a train back
to Frankfurt (for all of our prolonged efforts, the as-the-crow-flies train journey took an embarrassing
four minutes). It was a pretty hot afternoon, so we were tired even if we hadn’t accomplished much. And anyway, it
wasn’t a complete failure. Other than having the story itself, we'd had plenty to
look at – we were surprised for instance at the volume of industrial activity so close to
the heart of a major city (perhaps as a sign of Germany’s status as the engine
of Europe), although even that observation tells you maybe we should have
realized earlier on that something wasn’t right…

We
went back to the hotel for a while, where we napped a bit and tried not to feel
too disappointed in ourselves. When we came back out after 7, we diligently
followed the map (there's an idea!). The first part of the walk didn’t yield too much of interest –
a lot of deserted restaurants winding up for the day. Eventually
we reached the business district and the big Euro sign sculpture outside the
European Central Bank, and from there the river. It was a warm but not stifling
night and the banks were filled with couples and groups hanging out, cyclists, summer
activity. We crossed to the other side, walked along for a while, crossed back
on another bridge and then into the old town. It’s quite compact, less
than a square kilometer, and of course teeming with our kind of people –
tourists! (in truth though it is a much more sterile-feeling environment than
the area around the hotel, which one might consider a good or a bad thing). Like all
European towns, the main square is filled with open-air restaurants, and we
ended up at one of those – the Zum Schwarzen Stern. It was emphasizing meals based on chanterelles, as they’re in season, so we both went
with that, and the time happily passed. It eventually got dark (maybe half an
hour later than at home) and we took a taxi back to the hotel. Then we noticed
for the first time a stylish-looking bar across the street, so we went there for
a final drink. And so in the end we basically achieved our plans for Frankfurt
after all!